Up at CatholicMom.com, my exhortation to parents on taking a little responsibility as primary educators. Because yes, these topics are just rolling off my brain these days. As you can imagine, the word counts on the papers are killing me. 500 words? Since when do I say *anything* in 500 words or less? Inconceivable.
. . . here’s what you need to know:
You’ll be reading Forming Intentional Disciples by Sherry Weddell, which I happen to think is one of the most important Catholic books on the market today. Important enough that I’m putting together a local book club in my own town, to meet and discuss the book. And so are you? Yes?
And because you like to talk about things on the internet, you’ll be visiting CatholicMom.com’s Lawn Chair Catechism discussion group. Led by Sarah Reinhard, whom you’ll recognize as one of my favorite writer-people. And who is an extroverted friendly person, so I bet sheee never clams up when it’s time to drop the J-word. She’ll be doing one of those linky-link festivals, or you can participate in the combox at CatholicMom.com, or at a participating blog near you.
(This blog is very near you.)
Because you don’t have a ton of money . . . Our Sunday Visitor is watching out for you: From now until the end of the month, you can purchase the book from the publisher’s website for $10, free shipping, no minimum. This is basically the wholesale price. Sarah asked OSV for a little coupon, and they responded with extreme generosity.
Because actually you’re illiterate very busy, but you like to talk about evangelization, or at least just complain about what’s wrong with the world . . . CatholicMom.com has pre-released the weekly discussion questions, which include a cliff-notes executive summary of each chapter. Find the link at the Lawn Chair Catechism landing page.
Because you’re exceedingly irritated that I’ve suddenly started using Facebook to post links to this event, and not a single cat photo . . . send your hate mail to Christian LeBlanc, Fr. Longenecker, and the SuperHusband. They started it, not me. I just write stuff and talk a lot.
Blurry Cat Photos are over-rated. Read Forming Intentional Disciples instead.
Who else to blame? Will Duquette say you should read it too.
And so does Mark Shea, but he’s friends with Sherry Weddell, so he’s probably just making it up.
I, on the other hand, have never even met Sherry, or even stalked her on the internet, so you can believe me.
PS: Pope Francis Says: You probably don’t want to answer all the “your parish” questions on the internet. But discuss in the privacy of your own local evangelization group? Yes indeed.
Guest post at my friend Sarah R.’s house: In which I explain that if you and your spouse find abstinence easy and fun, perhaps something is not quite right.
Mid-May update:
Latin Happiness. At CatholicMom.com: In which I explain how I went over to the dark side and paid for flashcards, AND monkey-themed Latin-Lite videos. Also found some other digital person to teach grown-up Latin to the boy and I, and no surprise, all are happier for it.
Shiny happy feeling inside this author: The reprint is at Catholic Lane. (Yay!)
A well-licked baby rat is a happy baby rat. SuperHusband & I have been taking Family Honor’s summer course on Catholic Sex-Ed. (It’s not called that. “Cultural Implications” or something like that.) Astute observers would have predicted: I’m really enjoying the class, whenever I set aside my natural dread of deadlines and obligations, and sit down to do the work.
Double-enjoying it once I realized I didn’t have to sit still and listen to the lectures, because hey, long stretchy headphone cords . . . I can workout while I listen. Score one for online courses.
Right now I’m reading this, of which you can download the executive summary at no charge:
Encouragement for those of us who sometimes doubt whether all this parenting effort is going to have any effect in the long run.
Forming Intentional Questions. The other reason I’m hiding from the internet is to churn out a set of discussion questions for Sherry Weddell’s Forming Intentional Disciples. Because I’m going to be part of a book club. And so are you. Bwahahaha . . . more news soon. Questions are written, and now need to be purged of typos.
Have a great week.
It’s BADD time again, May 1. Of course I forgot, again, even though I knew it was coming up. But look, over at New Evangelizers, I reviewed Theology of the Body for Everybody. Which hits on exactly this topic. The whole living-in-a-body experience we human persons get to enjoy. Go look.
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And now you’re back, and here is my annual BADD comment, 2013 Edition:
People don’t want to be treated like dirt.
Profound, I know. (Hence Leah Perrault’s whole book on the topic. See “book review” above.)
When you read around at crotchety disability-rights sites, there’s a lot of conversation about how to think about disability. Something that confuses bystanders is the insistence that it’s not about the medical condition.
Which puzzles, for several reasons. The first is the happy-sad problem. Given the choice between hearing and not-hearing, seeing and not-seeing, walking and not-walking, everything else equal, we go for the ability every time.
Now someone might say, “I’m so glad I had this stroke, because it caused me to learn so much about __{insert profound revelation here}__.” And what they mean is typically not, “I always wanted to know what it was like to slur my speech!”
Rather, the “I’m so glad” is usually code for, “I discovered there was this whole part of my life I’d been ignoring, and now I’ve grown in ways that matter far more than any physical ability, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” People say that, and they mean it. For good reason. But still, if they could have the spiritual growth and the ability to remember words on command, yeah, they’d take both. Nothing wrong with being able to talk. We know this, instinctively.
But here’s the other thing we know instinctively: Humans deserve to be treated with respect. And the disrespect of disablism falls into two big lumps:
1. Can’t be bothered to have you around. Too much work. So terribly haaaaaarrrd to put in a ramp. So coooooomplicated trying to have one Mass, anywhere in the diocese, ever, with an ASL interpreter. So very, very overwhelming, having to change the seating arrangement, or modify the assignment, or find one more volunteer to assist the kid who needs assistance.
The message is pretty clear: It’s not that we don’t love you. We just don’t love you enough to go through any inconvenience for you.
2. Your kind of suffering is not my kind of suffering. This is straight out of the eugenics playbook. It’s no surprise that the recent fashion for killing off disabled children before they see light of day is always couched in terms of “avoiding suffering”. Better to be dead than to be you.
The feeling may well be mutual, but that’s no solution. The solution is to quit being such a wimp. To quit dividing the Fates of Man into a two-part list, labeled Normal Problems and Pitiful Freaks. This isn’t 1930. Get over that nasty notion that you must be ranked among The Fit in order to deserve life and respect.
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And since BADD is the annual day for airing our pet peeves, I’ll share one with you: If you never really appreciated your kid-job-marriage-finger-toe-brain until it was gone . . . could you keep it to yourself? Or just let everyone know you have a gratitude-deficiency-disorder. I guess I could cultivate some compassion for that.
See all the BADD entries, which are by no means Catholic nor genteel, here.
If you’d gotten the impression I’ve spent the last two weeks with no other thoughts than bacon . . . that would be a reasonable guess. Since it’s Friday, I’ll be sociable and make a list of seven.
1. At AmazingCatechists.com, I wrote yesterday about how to evaluate your Christian Formation situation using the Great Commandment. It’s a fleshing-out of this comment I left at William O’Leary‘s combox:
Couldn’t agree more. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your *mind*, and all your strength.
Which means the more your mind is capable of, the more it needs to study the faith. If you don’t love Jesus, you’ll love something else. If you don’t worship Him, you’ll worship something else. If you don’t work for Him, you’ll work for something else. –> And if you don’t use your powers of reason to know and understand Him . . . that blank space in your brain will be filled with something else.
We’re made to know God, and know Him fully. No other way to be happy.
-me.
2. At CWG today, I tossed up a couple links on writing competence and the new evangelization. Something we struggle with at the writer’s guild is that fine line between “encouragement” and “enabling”. If we had a narrower focus, like “only literary fiction”, or “only professional authors with trade-published credentials”, it wouldn’t be so difficult. But since we represent all faithful-to-the-Magesterium Catholic writers, from aspiring amateurs on up, every genre . . . it’s a bumbly boat.
I like the bumbly boat, of course, since it’s the only one that’ll let me in.
3. Is it a cult, or just weird and stupid? Fr. L. posted an excellent article on the traits that characterize cult-like behaviors.
Readers here will be assured, having reviewed the criteria, that I am in no danger of becoming a cult leader. Whew.
4. Sometimes I wonder whether what I wrote somewhere else is really of interest to readers here, and whether I should post a link. The other month when some people were freaking out because Pope Francis Is Not Pope Benedict, I posted some thought at AC. Naturally I linked it all back to catechesis, since I didn’t want Lisa M. kicking me off her blog. And because it was relevant.
I re-read my post and thought it wasn’t that bad. So you could go look, if you wanted.
5. A non-bacon recipe: Venison stroganoff. So good you can eat the leftovers cold for breakfast. What to do:
6. I know. It’s not deer season. Too bad. Ask your friends to open up their freezer to you.
7. I had a long train of thought (hanging out laundry), and ended up with this thought: If there one thing — and only one thing — I could ask bishops and priests to do over the next year towards the reform of the Church, it would be this:
Make the Catholic Faith the Non-Negotiable Minimum Standard for Those in Ministry
People freak out when you do this.
So I completely get that it’s an unpleasant task, and clergy want to be all pastoral, and all that. And to be clear: I want the pews packed — packed — with tax-collectors and other sinners. That’s what not what I’m talking about. I’m speaking only to those in ministry. The DRE who tells the confirmandi that gay marriage is AOK. (Didn’t happen at my parish, whew.) That kind of stuff.
And that’s something only those in authority can actually enforce. We lay folk can do all kinds of helpful things to make up for a pastor who can’t read a contract, or doesn’t know how to hire a good plumber, or whose fingers freeze when it comes to dialing 9-1-1 . . . but we the laity can’t really do a whole lot when the hierarchy decides to be indifferent to the practice and teaching of the faith.
So that’s my new one thing. I figured out it’s the source of my chronic grumpiness about these or those other little hot-button topics. So I’m resolving to at least keep my temper-tantrums focused on the real issue.
Meanwhile, since what comes around goes around . . . What do you think is the one thing clergy wish laypeople would do?
Either you believe in women’s liberation or you don’t. Do you believe that mentally competent, grown women are capable of making their own purchases?
Then require employers to pay us a living wage, and let us make our own purchases.
Women don’t need men at the office, men in Congress, or men at the HHS to force us to spend our wages on this pill or that surgery. And we don’t need Mama making us buy stuff either.
We’re grown-ups. Pay us fairly, and we’ll pick our own health insurance, thank you very much.
Over at the borg, we’ve been instructed to explain why the borg is best why we believe as we do. After much deleting to get it nearly inside the 200-word limit, I posted mine at the Happy Catholic Bookshelf.
We’ll do the even more abridged version here: Because it’s true.
And with that, I wish you a lovely Triduum, and I’m going to slowly unplug and start getting ready for a few days of peaceful silence family time observing the holy days.
Portrait Photography at the Fitz Studio
My monthly column at New Evangelizers is up this morning. FTR: I’m absolutely no good at telling whether my daughters’ pants are too tight, and their skirts too short. So if you read my column, and you get this vision of me as one of those people whose daughters are always dressed with perfect modesty, and then you meet my kids and you think, Wow, that’s an amazingly sleazy outfit that child is wearing . . . It’s okay to voice your vote. Because yep. To quote myself:
” . . . we ladies don’t instinctively understand modesty — we’re no more aroused at the sight of a bare shoulder than at the sight of a naked Golden Retriever.”
In the past 48 hours I’ve been guilty, more than once, of uttering crude expressions of impatience concerning select clergy. Not publicly, and not out of ill-will, just a general, “Will this guy get with it for a change!”
Lots of us are guilty. We want all these guys we call “Father” — the one we grew up with, or without, and the ones in our Church — we want them to be wonderful. We want them to be holy, and kind, and wise, and good. And we want them to know what to do. To know how to fix things.
But they’re just these guys. They wear funny clothes. They have strange taste in music. They are too indulgent with that child, and too severe with the other one. They didn’t do Christmas / Thanksgiving / Birthdays / Math Homework / Yard Maintenance / The Easter Triduum just the way we think they should. They work too long, or retire too early, or both.
They stink at interior decorating. And most of them snore.
Also, when you get to be a parent of a certain age, you look back and do the math, and realize just how young your father was, way back when, when you as a child thought he was so old. When you thought he knew everything, because you were six? He was barely into adulthood. When you thought he knew nothing, because you were sixteen? He was still just cutting his teeth on the What Do I Do With This Teenager of Mine problem. And when he’s eighty, he’s being eighty for the first time in his life. He’s just improvising.
He’s guessing. That’s what fathers do.
I’ve lost my patience with the Francisco-Obsessing. He’s just this guy. He dresses funny. Guys dress funny. It’s what they do.
I know the Holy Father, and your bishop, and your parish priest, and your dad, they all do certain symbolic actions that send important messages. But you know how there’s all those NFP instructors who make that smarmy admonition that husbands should do the charting, as if the measure of a man’s worth could all be summed up in one glorious epitaph, “He Recorded Her Mucus Faithfully”?
A man is not a symbol. He’s a person. If he doesn’t chart, but he does do his best to earn a living, and help rear the children, and say nice things to you now and again, and maybe even change your oil, doesn’t that count for something? You can be the dad that tells bedtime stories, or the one who reads the Bible at breakfast, or the one who plays ball on Sunday afternoon, or the one who takes a kid along when he goes to the hardware store . . . and you don’t have to be all of them. Being one guy is enough.
Guys who cheat on their wives, or abandon their children, or refuse to support the family, or commit any number of gross abuses of their responsibility? They deserve the harsh words that come their way. Guys who don’t discipline their children, ever, or can’t be bothered to see they get a decent education, or don’t listen and take action when the kids come to them with problems? They need a serious talking to. They need to put on their Man Pants and step up to the plate.
But the guy who dresses funny and dines at all the wrong restaurants? Whatever. He’s not a better dad because he’s so dapper, or so frugal. He’s not a worse dad because he wants Thanksgiving served on heirloom china, or on paper plates.
And you can’t know what it all means, not really. If he surrounds himself with elegant things, he’ll be accused of being self-indulgent, or pompous, and also of being erudite and cultured. If he wears the same pair of jeans for fifteen years straight, he’ll be accused of being slovenly and lazy, and also a “man of the people” who “doesn’t get caught up in appearances”. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.
Maybe he’s just this guy.
Francisco’d better appoint good bishops. He’d better elevate good cardinals. He ought to direct the curia deftly, pay attention to necessary reforms, and teach clearly and accurately. He needs to cultivate his own spiritual life lest he fall into greater sins than the one he commits already (whatever they are, I have no idea what they might be), and in the hopes that he might yet grow further in wisdom and holiness.
Lord willing, he’ll do all this, and do it well.
And if he does, I pretty much don’t care where he lives. I don’t care what he eats. I don’t care about the car he drives, the shoes he wears, or the kind of music he listens to at night. Not so long as none of it’s immoral, and none of it prevents him from doing his real Dad Jobs.
And if he screws it up? He’s accountable for that, too. It’s a false piety to think that “Honor Your Father” means “Pretend Sin Is Not Sin”. Francisco has serious responsibilities. Heresy and dissent are rife within the Church. Corruption, crime, and immorality among the clergy and laity have got to be addressed. What is true and good — whether it comes in more formal or more humble trappings — needs to be encouraged and promoted. No amount of visiting prisoners or chatting with the help gets a pope excused from doing his (other) fatherly duties.
But any man who’s doing his Dad Jobs gets a free pass to dress as goofy as he wants, sit in his favorite comfy chair, and stock his beverage cooler with whatever the heck he wants. He’s a father. Call him to task on his Manly Responsibilities, if indeed he neglects them. You don’t have drink his Pabst Blue Ribbon, or his Glenfiddich, if turns your stomach. More for him. So be it.
Holy Thursday’s tomorrow. Pray for priests.
